Canadian writer Alice Munro has probably done more for the short story than any other author writing in English. Firstly, there is her absolute dedication to the form. Apart from a single novel - The Beggar Maid - itself a series of interrelated stories strung together into a necklace of a novel - she has devoted her long writing career to the short story. This is her 10th volume. Secondly, she has elasticated the form, made it seem airier and more roomy, while each story can boast the dense complexity of a novel.
The title really says it all, such is the breadth of Munro's hazardous emotional landscape. Here is a writer at the top of her form - mature, confident, powerfully reflective, quietly authoritative. Indeed, it is easy to take Munro for granted. She produces a carefully considered volume of short stories every couple of years, and any constant reader of her work will see themes recurring. Yet there is never a feeling of treading over ground already too well dug over. She worries away at certain scenarios, e.g. young wives in vaguely unsatisfactory marriages, harried by young children and considering escape. And, whereas in earlier volumes the escape option usually proved too strong to resist, in this, the motives for staying are explored - the road more travelled?
Such a woman is 24-year-old Lorna in 'Post and Beam', married to Brendan, an older academic, with two young children and flirting with the notion of an affair with a former student of her husband's who has taken to sending her poetry secretly through the post. But when poor relation Polly arrives into this comfortable household, she induces such guilt in Lorna that she makes a bargain with God - with whomever - to stay with her husband in return for some abstract happiness for Polly, the stay-at-home cousin trapped by the family Lorna has gratefully escaped.
This is the constant surprise of Munro's fiction. The reader is often lulled into a false complacency, mistaking familiar territory for comfortable outcome. Then suddenly Munro's gimlet eye will light upon the character hovering at the edges, someone who in other hands might be a mere plot device or caricature, but who quietly subverts the reader's expectations. Her surprises are subtle, insidious. Rarely of the "agh" kind, more a soft, bemused "oh!"
But that is not to say there is not a dark seam running through the work. Take the bleak Beckettian territory of 'The Bear Came Over The Mountain', in which Grant and Fiona, an elderly couple, are forced into a reverse replay of his philandering past when Fiona is admitted to a nursing home with dementia and forms a passionate attachment to another patient. Grant finds himself pushed to the emotional sidelines and recklessly considers one last romantic conquest in order, oddly, to guarantee his wife's happiness.
The other strength of Munro's writing is its exacting and haunting sense of place. In the title story of the collection, a spiteful prank by two teenage girls brings an unlikely couple together, and they set up house in an abandoned hotel which has all the excluding bleakness of a Hopper painting. "It was covered in sheets of tin stamped to look like bricks and painted a light blue. There was the one sign HOTEL, in neon tubing, no longer lit over the doorway . . . Off in a side room she could see the glimmer of a mirror, empty shelves, a counter. These rooms had the blinds pulled tightly down."
But it is, as always, the emotional precision of Munro's language that leaves imploding resonances - like biting into a sherbet lozenge and savouring the explosive fizz that lingers. A cancer patient given an expected reprieve in 'Floating Bridge' is afraid to ask too many questions of his doctor. "He came from Syria or Jordan or some place where doctors kept their dignity. His courtesies were frigid." Or in 'Family Furnishings', the narrator notes that a couple of aunts in a well rehearsed retelling of an old family tragedy "had always made me feel as if there was some obscene connivance going on, a fond fingering of whatever was grisly or disastrous".
But for the forensic examination of the reticent bloom of late love - "her heart had been dry, and she had considered it might always be. And now such a warm commotion, such busy love" - or the darkly comic indignities of the twilight years, go no further than this book. Better still, bring it with you on your way to the Sunshine Home for the Bewildered.
Mary Morrissy's novel The Pretender was recently longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2002